This chapter examines the main issues at stake in the present-day heated debate regarding intervention between those adamantly opposed to any such notion, which they regard as an oxymoron; and those supportive of saving lives with the use of external armed force in exceptional cases, even without UN authorization, when extended massacres take place with no end in sight. The chapter also presents the situation on the ground during the Cold War and from 1989 onwards and refers to the recent notion of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) adopted at UN level in 2005. It concludes with the main nine questions discussed among supporters of humanitarian intervention, including legitimacy, the threshold of suffering (ethnic cleansing, genocide, etc.), the timing of intervention, the motives and the question of abuse by large powers.

Humanitarian intervention – that is,
military intervention aimed at saving innocent people in other countries from massive
violations of human rights (primarily the right to life) –
entered public consciousness around 1990 as never before in the course of the
twentieth century. It has earned a central place in scholarly research and in the
preoccupations of decision-makers and international organizations and has captured the
imagination of the wider public in a fashion few other political subjects have
achieved in the post-Cold War world.1
Ironically, it is in the limelight not due to its general acceptance but because of
its controversial character, which has led to acrimonious debates. At the two ends of
the scale there is, on the one hand, rejection, with the notion seen as nonsensical,
an ‘oxymoron’,2 the hallmark of
deceit and, on the other, its acceptance as one of the clearest manifestations of
altruism, the epitome of human solidarity and compassion (the ‘good
Samaritan’), the willingness to face great risk and considerable loss to
save the lives of ‘strangers’, with no gains.

Interestingly, rejection of, and sheer incredulity with,
‘humanitarian intervention’ is shared across the ideological spectrum,
from realist scholarship in international relations to Marxism and other forms of
leftist critique, as well as pacifism. From the realist line of reasoning, which has
its origins in Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Spinoza, so-called
‘humanitarian’ or other ethical concerns have no place in international
politics and are damaging to rational foreign policy. More scathing is a critique from
Carl Schmitt, who argued that ‘war in the name of humanity, is not war for the
sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal
concept against its military opponent’, identifying itself with humanity and
denying it to the enemy.3 He adds (as
if he were a Marxist) that it has been used as ‘an ideological
instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a
specific vehicle of economic imperialism … whoever invokes humanity wants to
cheat’.4

The question of intervention for humanitarian reasons poses agonizing
dilemmas. There is the tension between the sanctity of life (saving human
beings) and the
veneration of sovereignty and independence; and there is the tension between doing
something salutary in a humanitarian crisis if the United Nations Security Council is
paralysed and abuse in the name of humanitarianism by intervening states. Most
liberals opt for saving lives5 and for
intervening, exceptionally, even without the authorization of the United Nations,
provided the intervention has gained wide international legitimacy and the plight is
so appalling that the interest in global humanity overrides narrowly defined national
interest.6 Realists of course discard
ethics in foreign affairs (with exceptions, such as those realists who take
seriously the ‘morality of states’7) and regard only threats to vital interests worthy of
intervention, and intervention for humanitarian reasons a delusion, or as bogus. Most
leftist thinkers, such as Noam Chomsky,8
Edward Said, Tariq Ali,9 Jacques Derrida or
Jean Baudrillard denounced the 1999 intervention in Kosovo and the whole idea of
‘humanitarian intervention’, as have other critical thinkers in more
scholarly manner, such as Anne Orford,10
Antony Anghie11 and Costas Douzinas.12 For them, intervention is by definition
abusive, the diktat of the powerful, a form of blatant neo-imperialism and
neo-colonialism. But a minority of leftist thinkers, who put a premium on
self-determination and saving the weak from the strong, are favourable to such
interventions, albeit in very exceptional cases, such as Jürgen Habermas,13 Michael Walzer14 and the more controversial Bernard Kouchner, with his droit
d’ingérence.15

Most international lawyers are opposed to such interventions,
emphasizing state sovereignty and independence. There has, though, been a shift, which
is far from insignificant, in that during the Cold War, among those opposed, the
majority were against the whole notion, while in the post-Cold War era most are
opposed to intervention only if it does not obtain UN authorization. Students of
international relations are more nuanced, especially non-realists,16 with those in the field of international ethics,
cosmopolitans in particular, who tend to be less burdened by sovereignty, supporting
unilateral humanitarian intervention, followed more guardedly by communitarians, from
Michael Walzer in the late 1970s onwards.17
They, together with international lawyers supportive of humanitarian intervention even
without a UN mandate, disagree mainly as to the level of onslaught that warrants
intervention, which ranges from systematic violations of fundamental human rights to a
situation akin to genocide,18 and the point
at which to intervene: early on or late in a conflict, when all attempts to stop the
humanitarian plight peacefully have failed.

During the Cold War, humanitarian intervention was generally considered
beyond the pale, although even then a minority of international lawyers supported
armed intervention on humanitarian grounds.19 Some states, notably the US in the cases of the Dominican
Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983), Belgium in Congo
(1960–61), Belgium and the US in Congo (1964) or
France in the Central African Republic (1979), had justified their
actions on humanitarian grounds. But the near consensus is that only three military
interventions qualify as humanitarian given that they put an end to widespread loss of life:
India’s intervention in East Pakistan (1971) (hundreds of
thousands of civilians dead and almost nine million refugees fleeing to India),
which led to the creation of Bangladesh; Vietnam’s overthrow of the heinous
Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot in Cambodia (1979) (with up to
two million civilian deaths mainly from disease and malnutrition in forced labour
camps); and the overthrow of Amin’s odious regime in Uganda (with
300,000 citizens murdered by Amin’s thugs) by Tanzania
(1979). Interestingly, all three intervening states did not justify
their action on humanitarian grounds (with the partial exception of India20) but on grounds of self-defence,
and all three intervened mainly for instrumental reasons, especially Vietnam. The
first two interventions faced heavy wind internationally, notably in the UN
(especially the Vietnamese invasion), even though they both saved many
lives.21

Following the end of the Cold War, the first post-bipolar decade
witnessed unprecedented interventionism on humanitarian grounds: safe haven for the
Kurds of northern Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Bosnia
(1992–95), the intervention of the Economic Community Of West
African States (ECOWAS) in Liberia (1990–96), the
US-led intervention in Haiti (1994), French-led forces in Rwanda
(1994), NATO’s intervention in Serbia and Kosovo
(1999) and the Australian-led intervention in East Timor
(1999).

In Rwanda effective French intervention came very late, following three
months of genocidal massacre by the Hutus of more than 800,000 Tutsis and many
moderate Hutus.22 The peacemaking
intervention of ECOWAS in Liberia headed by Nigeria23 and NATO’s Kosovo/Serbia operation took place without
authorization by the UN Security Council. NATO’s Kosovo/Serbia operation gave
rise to a heated discussion not only because of its lack of UN endorsement but also
due to the choice of means (high-altitude aerial bombardment), which led
to hundreds of civilian deaths, more intense ethnic cleansing by the repugnant
Milosevic regime, thousands of refugees, considerable destruction of infrastructure
and environmental pollution.24 Many had
feared that this Kosovo precedent would open a Pandora’s box but this did not
come about, partly due to these unintended consequences. In the second part of 1999,
the Australian-led peacekeeping operation in East Timor took place with UN sanction,
with no mismatch between the military means and humanitarian ends, and it turned out
to be peaceful.25 With the onset of the new
millennium – and with ‘9/11’ and its repercussions as far as US
priorities were concerned (the ‘war on terror’) –
the idea of humanitarian intervention seemed to have ‘evaporated’,26 although there were at least two
candidates, Sierra Leone and Sudan’s Darfur. The next humanitarian
interventions took place more than a decade later: the NATO-led operation in Libya
(February–October 2011) and the French peacekeeping operation in
the Central African Republic (December 2013), both authorized by the UN
Security Council.27

In the wake of the Kosovo experience, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
pondered: ‘On the one hand is it legitimate for a regional organisation to use
force without a UN
mandate? On the other is it permissible to let gross and systematic violations
of human rights, with grave humanitarian consequences, continue
unchecked?’28 Addressing the
UN General Assembly in September 1999, he expressed his strong reservations about
NATO’s unauthorized intervention in Kosovo and Serbia but added: ‘If in
those dark days and hours leading to the genocide [in Rwanda] a
coalition of States had been prepared to act in the defence of the Tutsi population,
but did not receive prompt Council authorization, should such a coalition have stood
aside and allowed the horror to unfold?’29 And he challenged the member-states to come up with a new
vision of sovereignty.30

The Annan challenge was taken up by the Canadian-sponsored
twelve-person International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
(ICISS), which responded by subsuming humanitarian intervention under
the novel concept of ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P or
RtoP).31 The aim of the R2P
approach was to ‘shift the terms of the debate’;32 it amounts to a ‘rhetorical trick’ of
flipping the coin and shifting the emphasis from the controversial right to intervene
for humanitarian reasons to the ‘less confrontational idea of a responsibility
to protect’,33 but the substance
remains the same.

In 2005 at intergovernmental level, the Outcome Document of the
UN World Summit (15 September) made it a primary responsibility of
states to protect their population against ‘genocide, war crimes, crimes
against humanity and ethnic cleansing’; if they fail to do so, a ‘timely
and decisive response’ becomes the responsibility of the international
community. The ICISS had suggested that the permanent members of the Security Council
refrain from using the veto in such cases as long as their vital interests are not at
stake but this was unacceptable to the US, Russia and China.34 The first test case of R2P was the intervention in Libya.35

Given the situation during the Cold War and the interventionism of the
1990s and the ongoing debate, the general impression is that humanitarian intervention
is basically a recent phenomenon, but in fact the concept of humanitarian intervention
had been established in the nineteenth century.

Before moving back in time (in chapter 2), let us identify the main issues at stake in the present-day
debate on the question of intervening or not intervening militarily for humanitarian
reasons. Putting aside the proverbial question of whether ‘violent means can
ever serve humanitarian ends’,36
today’s debate includes six main questions and at least three secondary
ones.

The first question concerns the legality–legitimacy spectrum.
Is legality through UN authorization indispensable? Is non-authorized
intervention by definition illegal or is it perhaps legal given an alternative reading
of the UN Charter?37 Can intervention
be condoned if it appears legitimate even though it is technically illegal, as the
Independent International Commission on Kosovo concluded in its detailed
report?38 Another tack is the
contention that one is faced with a complex legal problem39 which may or may not be resolved on an ad hoc basis.

A second
question is where to place the threshold for intervening with or without UN
authorization: on systematic human rights violations (such as systematic
discrimination akin to apartheid or ‘internal colonialism’), on
something more grave, such as so-called egregious crimes (i.e. ethnic
cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity), or only at the level of mass
extermination and genocide?40

A third issue is in which cases to intervene (with or without
UN authorization): in a protracted internal war (Liberia, Syria),
in a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ (Somalia), a
separatist war (Kosovo) or only to put an end to one-sided onslaught
(Rwanda), or in all four cases?

A fourth problem is abuse (wrong intentions and ulterior
motives) and how it can be checked, if at all. UN authorization, collective
intervention and intergovernmental supervision may do the trick but what if they are
not forthcoming? And even if they are, they may still be seen as suspect, for
the permanent members of the Security Council (as in the case of the Concert of
Europe in the nineteenth century) can hardly be counted upon – or live
up – to being the moral consciousness of the world. A related factor is the
presence of tangible interests as motives and how they can be reconciled with
humanitarian motives and intentions, especially since ‘saving strangers’
on its own is unlikely to provoke intervention.41

Another question is timing. Should intervention take place only after
the exhaustion of all peaceful means (i.e. as a last resort) or should
there be early, anticipatory intervention and preventive deployment once egregious
crimes have been spotted, such as ethnic cleansing, so as to forestall a humanitarian
disaster (the Kosovo model) and to avoid greater use of military force
later, even though early intervention would be more difficult to justify
internationally?42

There is also the need for a reasonable estimate of a successful
outcome, that is, of attaining the humanitarian goals, avoiding ‘noble
intentions and bloody results’,43
with few deaths of civilians and little destruction of infrastructure (sparse
‘collateral damage’).44
There is also the related issue of ensuring that less damage is done by intervening
than by not intervening.45

The three secondary questions concern: a quick exit strategy or a
longer stay for fear that the bloodbath and anarchy will resume;46 how many casualties of ‘our soldiers’
are acceptable;47 and the fact that the
intervening states are by definition more powerful, which smacks of the powerful
bullying the weak under a smoke-screen of righteousness.48

The recent tendency of advocates of humanitarian intervention is to
borrow from the well developed ‘just war’ doctrine of the Middle Ages
and Renaissance (see chapter 2), with
the criteria for a just war remodelled to fit modern conditions. The following
‘just war’ criteria are all regarded as essential for a humanitarian
intervention to be contemplated: right authority, in the sense of ‘legitimate
authority’ and not simply legal (factual) authority, which also
alludes to ‘failed states’ as illegitimate and not worthy of sovereignty;49 just cause (massive suffering); right
intention (humanitarian motives genuine and not a ruse); last resort;
proportional means (good over harm); and a reasonable prospect of
success, leading to a ‘just peace’.50

18For a low threshold see W. M. Reisman, ‘Sovereignty and
Human Rights in Contemporary International Law’, American Journal of International
Law, 84:4 (1990), 866–76; A. D’Amato, ‘The Invasion of
Panama Was a Lawful Response to Tyranny’, American Journal of
International Law, 84:2 (1990), 516–24; F. R. Tesón,
‘Eight Principles for Humanitarian Intervention’, Journal of
Military Ethics, 5:2 (2006), 95–100, 105–6. For a high
threshold, a ‘spike test’, see T. Farer, ‘Cosmopolitan
Humanitarian Intervention: A Five-Part Test’, International Affairs,
19:2 (2005), 215–19.

19They included some major figures from an older generation,
such as Lauterpacht, Guggenheim, de Visscher, Reisman, McDougal and Jessup, as well
as Lillich, D’Amato, Moore, Chilstrom, Levitin, Umozurike, Sornarajah and
Tesón.

24For the international law debate see: R. A. Falk,
‘Kosovo, World Order, and the Future of International Law’,
American Journal of International Law, 93:4 (1999), 847–57; B.
Simma, ‘NATO, the UN and the Use of Force: Legal Aspects’, European
Journal of International Law, 10 (1999), 1–22; A. Cassese,
‘Ex injuria jus oritur: Are We Moving Towards International
Legitimation of Forcible Humanitarian Countermeasures in the World Community?,
European Journal of International Law, 10, (1999), 23–30; L. Henkin,
‘Kosovo and the Law of “Humanitarian Intervention”’,
American Journal of International Law, 93:4 (1999), 824–8; R.
Wedgewood, ‘NATO’s Campaign in Yugoslavia’, American Journal
of International Law, 93:4 (1999), 828–34. More generally see
Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report: Conflict,
International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000); A. Schnabel and R. Thakur (eds), Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian
Intervention (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2000).

Publication History:

Chapter

Publication History:

The introduction chapter depicts a common story of thousands of Black migrants to Canada from various Caribbean islands and territories. Contact with a cricket and social club was critical for settling in Toronto’s urban and suburban neighbourhoods, finding (mainly) middle-class jobs, returning home to their nations of origin for visits, and travelling to Black plurilocal homespaces created in Canada, the Caribbean, the United States, and England. The Mavericks Cricket and Social Club (MCSC) involved sport, spectatorship, food, music, dancing, travelling, and socializing that were crucial for recreating the sense of home necessary for Black men’s survival in a city rife with interpersonal and systemic racism. The chapter outlines the ways in which cricket is an essential yet often forgotten component of Black Atlantic cultures and Canadian socio-politics The chapter describes the MCSC participants and researcher involved in this study; reviews the sociological processes of making and crossing group boundaries; and sets the context for the book by reviewing a range of literatures including the Black Atlantic and the Caribbean diaspora in Canada, studies of sporting diasporas, the narrative inquiry approach used, and the contents of the remaining book chapters.